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Brown and Levinsons (1987) Politeness Theory In this section, we will review Brown and Levinsons (1987) politeness model. We will first present the overview of the Brown and Levinsons model, and then elaborate on the major issues on the model: Model Person, Face and Positive and Negative politeness strategies in turn. First of all, what does being polite mean in our language use? Under what circumstances do we use more polite words, markers, or even structures? It is not difficult to notice that expressions conveying the speakers politeness are closely connected with certain speech acts such as request, question, invitation or disagreement. For example, we often have to use hedges before a request, such as Im sorry but.By using this initial clause, the speaker can avoid potential threats that his request is rejected by the addressee the case where his self-image would not be compromised. The speaker is also taking risks because his request would offend the hearer; he would probably make the circumstance awkward. Thus, the hedge plays an important role for buffering a possible tension between the speaker and the addressee. On the other hand, we might initiate conversation with our close friend by calling their nickname. For example, for invitation of him/her to the birthday party, we could say, Hey Pumpkin, this Saturday is my birthday. Come. Youll like it. Expressions, such as Hey Pumpkin, show intimacy between the interlocutors and they will also count as a politeness strategy. Politeness has largely two roles. On the one hand, it is defined as a speech act alleviating those risks, which is termed as face threats, triggered by certain face-threatening acts toward another (i.e. a request in our example) (Mills, 2003, p. 6). On the other hand, the speech act also plays a role for showing intimacy between the interlocutors. Let us turn to Brown and Levinsons (1987) politeness model that outlines the speakers politeness strategies. There are basically two types of politeness strategies: positive and negative, and they will be discussed in detail in the following subsections. Brown and Levinson are interested in two Suhyun Kwon, Seungwan Ha issues: First, they want to generalize types of politeness strategies in our language use. They attempt to define under what situation a particular strategy is supposed to be exercised. Second, they propose that this generalization is universally applied. This is a very strong proposal. What this means is that we can predicts that an individual would use a strategy under a given situation. The universality also implies that there might be no cultural differences in the applications of politeness strategies. For examples, under the same context, the American speaker and the Korean speaker would use the same types of strategies. At the first glance, this strong claim seems to be easily falsifiable because in normal life even the same person would behave differently: he might be polite one day but rude in another for the same situation. Therefore, Brown and Levinso(1987) come up with the idea of model person. Let us start our discussion of model person in the next section.